Friendship in the Form of Duck Necks

Sometimes friendship comes in the form of a beautiful, silky, hand-made apron from Cookie Baker Lynn

The apron is gorgeous! Thank you Lynn!

Then, there are other times that friendship comes in a big box of miscellaneous animal parts:

This guy looks way too chipper for marketing his feet: But notice that he’s got NO NECK.

That’s because it went to this tasty treat:

Which got me thinking about how much neck does a duck have?

In addition the duck neck and duck feet, I got dried squid, lots of seaweed snacks, duck tongues and duck gizzards. Anyone want to try? I’ll send you a snackity snack if you agree to try it!!!

Thank you Listen to Uncle Jay! Jay does something important with big-time sports teams all over the world. He was in China doing something important for the NBA China Games and he slipped my logo over the Mercedes Benz logo at the stadium last November. Now, if you could do that during the Beijing Summer ORRRIMPICS, that would be super cool. Don’t worry, Mercedes Benz won’t mind.

Giveaways

34 Comments

The wife loves all the things mentioned by the other posters. Me, not so much. 🙂

I have been considering deep frying the crickets that I buy for my boy’s geckos. 99c for 30 large. Hell, i have to feed ’em and plump them up before I give them to the lizards, why not enjoy myself?

I do have to say that I liked the jellyfish served at our wedding reception. The chicken feet on the other hand looked like Foghorn Leghorn’s feet, not the normal chicken feet you’d see during a dim-sum repast. Big white meaty things with huge nails.

I’ll dry-ice you some alligator if you can’t get it in your Publix if you send some necks with your recipe 🙂

(Wow! I missed this…
Internet down here is spotty at best. I only have access for a few mninutes a day.)

Glad you enjoyed the package…
Heading to Beijing in February, so expect a box of new goodies soon thereafter. 😉

I’m stuck down in the Tortuags for a few more days… My larder is getting quite empty.
(Poor planning on my part.)

I got a bag full of stone crab claws from one of the girls on the ferry boat, so last night was a feast. Today the Sea Purslane is looking pretty tasty. Hoping to catch a snapper or two off the dock. That will make for a tasty supper!

I’ll try the tongue and gizzards! We eat a lot of cow tongue, though it’s been quite some time. Just like tripe… Ppl don’t want to hear about it.. but it’s really really good when cooked right. Can’t wait to try ur snacks!

My great-grandparents hailed from Germany, but what allows me to give you this link is the fact that my boss is Japanese and he sent this link to me first. It’s a site dedicated to the Asian countries marketing to Americans:)http://engrish.com/
Enjoy!

well, i was about to post that i have already tried all of those,(except the duck tongue… i had a good friend i worked with that brought all kinds of fun, weird stuff for lunch) and was feeling pretty adventurous, but rhesuspieces00 has me all beat with the adventurous!!! :]

I ate enough duck tongues in Chengdu that I could make PETAs most wanted list. We ordered some at a hot pot restaurant, and they brought us a platter of about 100 of them. Seriously. Multiple flocks of waterfowl died for the sake of providing me an appetizer. About half way through, I discovered the trick to eating them is you have to cook them a lot longer than you think. They aren’t very big, so they’re “cooked” after just a couple minutes in the broth. But if you leave them for about 10 minutes longer, they get tender and you can suck the meat off the little strip of cartilage that runs through the middle. Surprisingly tasty.

Much better than the duck BRAINS and EYEBALLS the grandmotherly lady at our table at the restaurant in Beijing kept insisting I eat. She interpreted my politely diplomatic compliance at the first offer as evidence of a desire to eat any and all duck brains and eyeballs available, and all subsequent refusals on my part as mere expressions of modesty, and then went about pilfering duck heads from other tables on my behalf. Before the evening was out, I had consumed the contents of half a dozen duck skulls.

Among the other strange and unpleasant things I’ve eaten in Asia, in order of increasing disgustingness:

* shark lips (yes, they have them)
* cartilage scraped from the roof of a cow’s mouth (waste not, want not)
* cow brains (i expect the mad cow disease diagnosis in a decade or two)
* fried sea horse (crunchy on the outside, crunchy on the inside.)
* sheep penis (when the girl with poor english said “this is cock” i thought she meant rooster)
*fried scorpion (i am pretty sure no one in china eats this except naive tourists)
* bat (the preparation involved skewering the little guy and sticking him in the fire till he stopped twitching. he tasted like burnt hair smells.)

(I got a pretty handmade apron, too, from Lynn.
Mine is even more gorgeous than yours! So there.)
I don’t think I want any duck parts just yet. I am still trying to get rid of the Christmas turkey.
That was some slick advertising. What did you do to arrange that?

I can’t understand why folks are bothered by tongue — pork & beef tongue are close to my favorite part of both animals (tacos with twice-cooked tongue in tomatillo sauce, anyone?) And I’ve eaten ducks feet before, too (no, I’m not asian, or even mexican, just north-american mongrel). Chicken gizzards are a staple of my personal diet, though I’ve never tried duck. I love these kinds of meats because they surpass just about anything else in terms of taste to cost ratio.

So I’m perfectly willing to try anything, but I have to say that these snacks don’t seem all that strange to me. So I’m afraid you’re better off sending them to someone who wouldn’t otherwise try them.

You mentioned gizzards and reminded me of childhood (especially thanks to Jen’s visual). Growing up, we raised chickens and rabbits. I hated when we had to butcher and clean them but I specifically recall the detail involved in cleaning chicken gizzards. While it was a gross process to clean them, it did have it’s “ooh” moments – as in “Ooh, I didn’t realize the grass in the coop was that long.” Aside from that, depending on how mom prepared them, I really liked eating them. Yum.

As for trying a Jaden snack specialty, I’m not so sure how brave I am. I’ll leave the free snack to someone who is passionate about tasting something new and I’ll just relish the childhood memory that surfaced as a result of this post.

Alright, all the Chinese who have eaten beef tongue at the wedding banquets raise your hand. I ate those since infancy, and I finally had a thought and asked my mom, what part of the cow was it. Of course, I didn’t ask until I was in my neurotic teen years. It was around the time I had to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. I gave up on tongue and chicken feet for a few years. Thinking back now, I always saw my parents by live squab and prepare them. Sometimes, it’s best to eat it at a restaurant. Now as an adult I have an appreciation to the animal that gave it’s life up for my appetite. I’m not telling my kid what he’s eating until he’s an adult. Bad enough Hubby told him, he was eating liver. Now why this kid has an issue with the guts of a chicken or cow versus a crab or fish? He says it’s because he leaves the kitchen when I take out the guts. Those styrofoam meats make it easier for him to eat. Darn teenagers.